Nicholas Wapshott

The “fiscal cliff” talks offer a chance to rebalance the American economy so that the long years of living beyond our means — spending too much and raising too little, paid for by borrowing from the Chinese – will be brought to an end in an orderly fashion. As we have seen from the pitched battle between the White House and the Republican House leadership, finding the right balance between tax increases and spending cuts is not easy.

You have got to admire Steven Spielberg. He has taken the well-worn story of Abraham Lincoln’s final days and turned it into a pointed piece of contemporary political commentary. When he first met Doris Kearns Goodwin back in 1999, well before she had completed her masterly account of the Lincoln White House, Team of Rivals, it seems Spielberg decided to film an episode in Lincoln’s life that would ring true at the time of release many years later. He chose to concentrate his “Lincoln” movie on a pivotal time in the presidency: the final five months when Lincoln had just been re-elected, when the Civil War was all-but won, and when the fractious House was undecided about whether to fall in with Lincoln’s stated aim of abolishing slavery.

In the civil war that broke out between Republicans the minute the election was called for President Obama, media conservatives have turned on media conservatives. But none have shown more recklessness than Andrew Sullivan, chief American columnist for Murdoch’s Sunday Times in London, who on “Real Time With Bill Maher” cheerfully chewed off the hand that feeds him. “The Republican Party has to say, ‘We have no part of Fox News,’ ” Sullivan declared.

If free-market economists were serious about their ideas, they would surely be arguing vociferously right now for the economy to plunge over the fiscal cliff. But where are the laissez-faire economists lining up to urge John Boehner to lead his Tea Party tribe in the House to veto all compromise and put our money where their mouths are? They are strangely silent. Instead, the debate is about how Keynesian we should be.

Amid the triumphant acclamation and the reluctant resignation of the two presidential candidates’ early morning speeches was the hint that politics is about to take a strange turn. Mitt Romney’s concession address was suitably gracious and, above dissenting heckles from his disappointed party workers, he included this veiled job application: “Our leaders have to reach across the aisle to do the people’s work, and we citizens also have to rise to the occasion.”

The 2012 election’s October Surprise arrived when Hurricane Sandy made landfall and brought the campaign to a halt. The real surprise, however, is how the narrative was so radically altered by the tropical storm’s progress through New Jersey and how Governor Chris Christie so quickly changed his mind about the president. Until the heavens opened, no Mitt Romney surrogate was more scathing and personally disrespectful toward the president than Christie, whose down-to-earth appeal to blue collar voters was considered so important by GOP strategists he was awarded the keynote address at the convention that crowned Romney the party’s candidate.

The murder by Islamist terrorists of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in Libya on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks has become one of the most contentious issues in the election. The administration has been flailing around, unsure of its facts, offering statements that turned out to be misleading. Republicans, led by Senator John McCain, have jumped on the errors by the State Department and the CIA that contributed to the confusion over our understanding of the slaughter in Benghazi, and backed an unrelenting press campaign attempting to show Barack Obama as either incompetent, a liar, or both.

The green shoots of recovery are growing a little taller. Newly released gross domestic product estimates measuring consumer and government spending, investments and net exports show the economy growing at 2 percent in the third quarter, up from 1.3 percent in the second. In normal times, this would be nothing to get excited about; average GDP growth between 1947 and 2012 was 3.25 percent. But we are recovering from a systemic financial crisis, not a routine dip of the business cycle, and in such cases recovery is noticeably more sluggish. Don’t believe Cassandras who suggest the good news is a chimera. We are in an “L”-shaped recovery rather than a “V”-shaped one, and the fact that GDP is steadily rising is in itself encouraging.

Whatever happened to Paul Ryan? Before he was made Romney’s running mate in early August, he was billed by commentators as a free-thinking firebrand who would invigorate the campaign with his keen intellect and forensic argumentative skills. Evidence for Ryan’s game-changing capacity was based on his sweeping but failed budget reform measures, the “Roadmap for America’s Future” and “The Path to Prosperity,” on his reputation as the Republicans’ most gifted intellectual, and on his boast that his political inspirations were Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” and Friedrich Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom.”

There is the truth. Then there is the whole truth. Mitt Romney is still lagging behind the president in Ohio, the weather-vane state that has voted for every president since Abraham Lincoln and where Barack Obama is credited with saving millions of jobs in the auto industry. But the governor’s insistence in the second debate that Obama’s rescue of General Motors and Chrysler was the same as his plan was only half the story.

Author Profile

Nicholas Wapshott is the International Editor of Newsweek. He previously served as New York bureau chief of The Times of London and editor of the Saturday Times of London. He is a regular broadcaster on MSNBC, PBS and FOX News. His new book "The Sphinx: Franklin Roosevelt, the Isolationists, and the Road to World War II" is due out in November. He is also the author of "Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage" and "Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics."